A British security consultant close to the Russian agent who was poisoned last weekend worked for an investigative consultancy agency run by former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the Telegraph reports.
According to the Telegraph, the consultant “lived close” to Col. Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent who was attacked by assassins Sunday. Skripal remains in intensive care after he was targeted with a chemical nerve agent while shopping with his daughter in Salisbury on Sunday.
As the Telegraph reprots, Skripal “moved to Salisbury” in 2010 and “became close to a security consultant employed by” Steele, the British spy who compiled a dossier alleging collusion between Donald Trump and Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election. The British security consultant cited by the Telegraph was also lived in Salisbury and worked at Orbis Business Intelligence, the company run by Steele.
Valery Morozov, a contractor who earned political asylum in the UK after fleeing Russia in 2014, told Channel 4 News on Wednesday he believes Skripal was “in regular contact with military intelligence officers at the Russian Embassy.”
“If you have a military intelligence officer working in the Russian diplomatic service, living after retirement in the UK, working in cyber-security and every month going to the embassy to meet military intelligence officers – for me, being a political refugee, it is either a certain danger or, frankly speaking, I thought that this contact might not be very good for me because it can bring some questions from British officials,” Morozov said.
As RawStory reported Wednesday, the attack on Skripal preceded an in-depth The New Yorker report on Steele’s work compiling the dossier.
